One
reason for looking at the late Roland Barthe’s writings about film is that we
all tend to be much too specialized in the ways that we think about culture in general
and movies in particular. Far from being a film specialist, Barthes could even
be considered somewhat cinephobic (to
coin a term), at least for a Frenchman. Speaking to Jacques Rivette and Michel
Delahaye In 1963, he confessed, “I don’t go very often to the cinema, hardly
once a week”—inadvertently reveling the French passion for movies that can
infect even a relative nonbeliever. Cinephobic?Perhaps. He certainly mistrusted the hypnotic spell exerted
by cinema and the attendant problem, for an analyst, of having to reconcile
this continuity of appeal with a discontinuity of what he called signs. Yet
what he had to say about literature, theater, photography, and music (his first
loves) may wind up telling us more about film than the entire output of many
movie critics. And what Barthes had to say about cinema—both in general and in
many specific cases—is often interesting enough in its own right.

2 Movie Problems

“Resistance
to the cinema “ he wrote in the self-regarding Roland Barthes (1975), trying to get a
fix on what he didn’t like about the medium. “Without remission, a continuum of
images; the film…follows, like a
garrulous ribbon: statutory impossibility of the fragment, of the haiku.” A
lover of the fragment and the haiku, he possibly came closest to analyzing a
film when he devoted an essay (“The Third Meaning”) to a few stills taken from
Eisenstein’s IVAN THE TERRIBLE. He virtually began his last book, Camera Lucida Reflections on Photography,
with the admission that “I decided I liked photography in opposition to the cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to
separate it.”

Nor
was this his only problem with movies. As he went on to say in Roland Barthes, “Constraints of representation (analogous to the
obligatory rubrics of language) make it necessary to receive everything: of a
men walking in the snow, even before he signifies, everything is given to me;
in writing, on the contrary, I am not obliged to see how the hero wears his
nails—but if it wants to, the Text describes, and with what force, Hölderlin’s
filthy talons.” The trouble, in short, was that film—that “festival of
affects,” as Barthes called it—offered the spectator too much, yet not enough.

3 A Late Starter

Born
In 1915, Barthes didn’t publish his first book, Writing Degree Zero, until he was thirty-seven He suffered from
pulmonary tuberculosis for much of his youth and published his first articles
(1942-1944) in a magazine put out by the Sanitarium des Étudiants where he was
staying much of the time I haven’t been able to track down the third of these
pieces—a review of the first feature directed by Robert Bresson, Los ANGES DU
PÉCHÉ.

Barthes
apparently didn’t deal with film again until about 1954, when he started to
write a series of magazine articles that eventually became grouped together
under the heading “Mythologies.” This involved writing about all kinds of
cultural activity, ranging from wresting to striptease to tourist guides, in
which films were allowed to play a significant part. In the course of
developing this approach-initially with the aid of semiology, and later with
the help of psychoanalysis-he constructed a antique of cinema that took shape
in such essays as “The Third Meaning” (1970) and “Upon Leaving the Movie
Theater” (1975).

In
the late 1970s, not long before Ms death, Barthes agreed to play the novelist
William Thackeray in his fiend Andre Téchiné's
film THE BRONTË SISTERS (He had earlier refused to play himself in Godard’s
ALPHAVILLE (1965) And after that, he even contemplated writing a film script which
Téchiné would direct, based on the life of
Marcel Proust.

4 Hair, Sweat, &
Semiology

Contemporary
resistance to semiology as a dry academic pursuit can’t be dealing with the
spited polemical and political use of it made by Barthes as a journalist over a
quarter of a century ago, when he was defining and attack- ing
current mythologies in the pages of Les
Lettres Nouvelles Semiology—a term and concept first formulated by linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure in the early years of this century, when he called for a
“science that studies the life of signs within society”—was in fact brought to
the attention of a wide public largely through Barthes’s efforts.

Inaugurating the chair of Literary Semiology at the College
de France in the late 1970s. Barthes
reminded his audience that:

Semiology, so far as I am concerned,
started from a strictly emotional impulse It seemed to
me (around 1954) that a science of signs might simulate social criticism, and that
Sartre, Brecht, and Saussure could concur in the project. It was a question, in
short, of understanding (or of describing) how a society produces stereotypes,
i e , triumphs of artifice, which it then consumes as
innate meanings, i.e., triumphs of nature Semiology (my semiology, at least) is
generated by an intolerance of this mixture of bad faith and good conscience
which characterizes the general morality, and which Brecht. in
his attack upon it, called the Great Habit.

In
“The Roman in Films” (1954), some of these stereotypes, as evidenced In Joseph
L. Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar,
turn out to be fairly amusing For instance, Barthes
notices that all the male characters in the film sport fringes in order to
demonstrate that they are Romans:

We
therefore see here the mainstream of the Spectacle—the sign—operating in the open. The frontal
lock overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt that he is in Ancient Rome.
And this certainty is permanent the actors speak, act, torment themselves,
debate “questions of universal import,” without losing, thanks to this little
flag displayed on their foreheads, any of their historical plausibility. Their
general representativeness can even expand in complete safety, cross the ocean
and the centuries, and merge into the Yankee mugs of Hollywood
extras no matter, everyone is reassured, installed in
the quiet certainty of a universe without duplicity where Romans are Romans
thanks to the most legible of signs: hair on the forehead.

From
this observation, Barthes goes on to trace two intriguing “subsigns” in the
film: (1) “Portia and Calpurnia, woken at dead of night, have conspicuously
uncombed hair,” and (2) “all the faces” in the film “sweat constantly,” a sign
of “moral feeling.” (“To sweat is to think—which evidently rests on the
postulate, appropriate to a nation of businessmen, that thought is a violent,
cataclysmic operation, of which sweat is only the most benign symptom “ Hence,
Caesar himself, “the object of the
crime,” is the only man in the film who remains dry.)

5 A Galaxy of Stars, A
Plurality of Texts

On
the subject of stars, Barthes had many intriguing things to say. Four months
after his bout with JULIUS CAESAR, he was decrying the excessive use of movie
stars in Sacha Guitry’s SI VERSAILLES M’ÉTAIT CONTÉ:

In the final analysts, the star system
is not without a kind of chicanery it consists of popularising
History by Cinema, and of glorifying Cinema by History. It’s a form of barter
Judged useful by both powers: for instance, Georges Marchal passes a little of
his erotic glory over to Louis XIV, and in return, Louis XIV surrenders a
little of his monarchical glory to Georges Marchal.

Barthes went on to reproach Guitry for
not taking a lesson from the costume styling of the Folies Bergère,
where the forms of period dress are false but “superbly so, with a fine
contempt for accuracy and a desire to give fancy dress an epic dimension.”

The
same year, he praised Charlie Chaplin as a Brechtian artist, showing “the
public its blindness by presenting at the same time a man who is blind and what
is in front of him,” that is, “a kind of primitive proletarian, still outside
Revolution” in MODERN TIMES. Twenty-five years later, in a regular column he
was writing for Le Nouvel Observateur,
he expressed his fascination with an image from LIMELIGHT—Chaplin applying
makeup in front of a mirror-as “literally a metamorphosis, such as only
mythology and entomology could speak about it.” And a few years before that,
writing about himself in the third person in Roland Barthes, R B. had this to say:

As a child, he was not so fond of
Chaplin’s films; It was later that, without losing sight of the muddled and
solacing ideology of the character, he found a kind of delight in this art at
once so popular (in both senses) and so intricate, it was a composite art looping together several
tastes, several languages Such artists provoke a complete kind of joy, for they
afford the image of a culture that is at once differential and collective
plural This image then functions as the third term, the subversive term of the
opposition in which we are imprisoned mass culture or high culture.

Writing
poetically about the face of Greta Garbo—that mythic object par excellence—the same year, Barthes
found that it represented a “fragile moment when the cinema is about to draw an
existential from an essential beauty, when the archetype leans towards the
fascination of moral faces, when the clarity of the flesh as essence yields its
place to a lyricism of Woman.”

Comparing
her face to the more individualized face of Audrey Hepburn, he concluded that,
“As a language, Garbo’s singularity was of the order of the concept,
that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance. The face of
Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.” The preceding translation is by
Annette Lavers When another Barthes translator, Richard Howard, published his
own version of this essay in the 1960s, this formulation was updated by
substituting Brigitte Bardot for Audrey Hepburn, leading to a more topical
closing line: “Garbo’s face is an Idea, Bardot’s a Happening.”

6 I Didn’t Know the Gun Was Coded

There’s
another way of looking at Barthes and film, less poetic, that
has been favored by certain academics. This involves seems him as a great system
builder, whose famous phrase by phrase textual analysis of a novella by Balzac
called Sarrazine, a study known as
S/Z, breaks down “the realist text” into “five levels of connotation” or
“codes.” From the methodology of analyzing prose narrative—which Barthes
derived collectively from one of his seminars—certain film academics have tried
to establish a more systematic approach in studying movies.

Without
wishing to dismiss this sort of work, I can’t say I’ve found it as useful as
Barthes’s more poetic and suggestive (if less systematic) writings. Maybe this
is because I value his work more for its questions than its answers, and more
for its artplay) than its science (and
work). In this respect stylistically and iconoclastically, Barthes is closer to
an American film critic like Manny Farber—above all, in the secularly cinematic flux, speed, and movement of
his thought—than he is to fellow French semiologists like Raymond Bellour and Christian Metz

One could also argue that the more
“teachable” an analytic approach is, the easier it becomes to apply It mechanically-as, Indeed, a generation of graduate
students and professors has often tended to apply S/Z, without much
thoughtfulness or insight.

7 Art as Immobility

Ideology
is, in effect the imaginary of an epoch, the Cinema of a society

—“Upon Leaving the
Movie Theater”

In
1959, when the French New Wave was Just beginning to
make itself felt, Barthes published a critique of Claude Chabrol’s first film,
LE BEAU SERGE, which called it right-wing for imposing a static image of man.
The same year, In Cahiers du Cinéma,
Chabrol wrote, “There’s no such thing as a big theme and a little theme,
because the smaller the theme is, the more one can give it a big treatment. The
truth is, truth is all that matters.” The problem
about this position for Barthes was that it led to political complacency. The
offhand way one looked at someone or sometime, he wrote, could become “the
basis for an act of sarcasm or one of tenderness, in short, a truth,” but the
offhand way one arrived at a theme could be a falsehood “What is terrible about
the cinema,” he added, “is that it makes the monstrous viable; one could even
say that currently our entire avant-garde lives on this contradiction true
signs, a false meaning.”

Summing
up what he liked in Chabrol’s provincial melodrama as “micro- realism,” Barthes
compared its “descriptive surface”—as in the gestures of children playing
football in the street—with that of Flaubert. “The difference— which is
considerable—is that Flaubert never wrote a story“ Flaubert had the insight to realize that the
ultimate value of his realism was its insignificance, “that the world signified
only that it signified nothing.”

Chabrol,
on the contrary, his realism firmly in place, invests a pathos and a moral-that
is to say, whether he wills it or not an Ideology There are no innocent stones
for the past hundred years, Literature has been struggling with this calamity.

For
Barthes, Chabrol’s “art of the right” always assigned meanings to human misfortunes
without examining the reasons:

The
peasants drink. Why? Because they’re very poor and have
nothing to do Why this misery, this abandon? Here the investigation
stops or becomes sublimated they are undoubtedly stupid in essence,
it’s their nature One certainly isn’t asking for a course in political economy
on the causes of rural poverty. But an artist should acknowledge his
responsibility for the terms he assigns to his explanations. there is always a
moment when art immobilises the world, and the later
it comes, the better I call art of the right this fascination with
immobility,which makes one describe
outcomes without ever asking about, I won’t say causes tart isn’t
deterministic), but functions

8 Buñuel Versus
Chabrol

Four years
later, interviewed by Cahiers du Cinéma,
Barthes pursued this notion further by evoking an art which challenged ideology
by suspending meaning—a development in some ways of Brecht’s ideas about
alienation and New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ideas about nonhumanistic
art:

What
I ask myself now is if there aren’t arts which are more or less reactionary by
their very natures and techniques I believe that of literature, I don’t believe
a literature of the left would be possible. A problematic literature, yes—that
is, a literature of suspended meaning an art which provokes responses but
doesn’t supply them. I think literature is that in the best of cases. As for
cinema, I have the impression that, in this respect, it’s very close to
literature, and because of its structure and material, it’s a lot better
prepared than theatre is for a certain responsibility for forms that I’ve
called the technique of suspended meaning. I think cinema has trouble supplying
clear meanings and that, in its present state, this shouldn’t be done. The best
films (for me) are those that suspend meaning the most, an extremely difficult
operation, requiring at once great technique and total intellectual honesty.
For that means disentangling oneself from all the parasite meanings.

As a
prime example of what he meant, Barthes cited Luis Buñuel’s recent THE
EXTERMINATING ANGEL—a brilliant comic horror film about wealthy guests who
inexplicably find themselves scalable of leaving a dinner party.

Here,
Barthes said, meaning was deliberately suspended without becoming nonsensical
or absurd, in a film that Jolted one “profoundly, beyond dogmatism, beyond
doctrine.” In the vulgar but accurate sense, it was a film that “made one
think.”

A few
years later, Barthes’s notion of suspended meaning would develop still further
into two major utopian, cultural models In his beautiful Empire of Signs (1970), Barthes posited Japan and its culture as a
system consisting of the “play” of “empty” signs—a concept that was crucially
to influence Noel Burch when the latter wrote his history of Japanese cinema, To the Distant Observer and in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), this
became the notion of a reader’s “bliss” as opposed to his or her “pleasure” in
reading a text-the former a discontinuity of signs akin to the experience of
sexual orgasm, when meaning again becomes suspended.

9 This Way, Myth

Passing
references to films in Barthes’s writings form a significant part of their
overall color and texture. Describing the mythical properties of the new
Citroën in 1955, he saw it “originating from the heaven of METROPOLIS.” The
same year, stirred in part by Jacques Becker’s TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, he
analyzed the “coolness” of gangsters in gangster films, marveling at the visual
and nonverbal emphasis of their behavior, which insured that “each man regains
the ideality of a world surrendered to a purely gestural vocabulary, a world
which will no longer slow down under the fetters of language: gangsters and
gods do not speak, they nod, and everything is fulfilled.” The next year,
writing about the myth of exoticism revealed by a documentary about the
Mysterious Orient, THE LOST CONTINENT, he noted the various means by which
Buddhism was treated as “a higher form of Catholicism” and dryly observed that,
“Faced with anything foreign, the Established Order knows only two types of
behavior, which are both mutilating either to acknowledge it as a Punch and
Judy show, or to defuse it as a pure reflection of the West.”

10 Barthes and Films

Sometimes
a particular film could goad Barthes into a major formulation. For many
readers, the key passage in The Pleasure
of the Text is a paragraph that links storytelling to the myth of Oedipus.
This was written, Barthes notes at the end, after having seen F. W. Murnau’s
CITY GIRL—a silent Hollywood film of 1929 that had just been shown on French
television In Roland Barthes, he
delighted in the “textual treasury” of a Marx Brothers movie, A NIGHT AT THE
OPERA—including “the liner cabin, the torn contract, the final chaos of the
opera decors”—as emblems of “the logical subversions performed by the Text.” In
the same book, he compared the process of his own writing to a theater
rehearsal in a film by Jacques Rivette (who, in turn, has spoken often of
Barthes’s influence on his own work), a rehearsal that is “verbose,
infiniteshot through with other
matters.”

Later,
in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
(1978), he would cite a scene from Buñuel’s THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE
BOURGEOISIE—a curtain rising “the wrong way round-not on an intimate stage, but
on the crowded theater”—as an emblematic image for the painful revelation of
commonplace information by a lover’s informer about his or her beloved. And in
a magazine column in 1979, he recorded his distress at an audience laughing at
the very things in Eric Rohmer’s PERCEVAL (like the hero’s simplicity) that he
loved the most, and his amusement at seeing “a very French film,” VINCENT,
FRANCOIS, PAUL AND THE OTHERS, on French television (“The stereotype here is
nationalized; it forms part of the decor, not part of the story”).

11 Ugly Excess

In
“The Third Meaning,” Barthes distinguishes three levels of meaning in the
stills from IVAN THE TERRIBLE that he examines. The first is informational, on
the level of communication, to be analyzed by semiology. The second is
symbolic, on the level of signification, to be analyzed by “the sciences of the
symbol (psychoanalysis, economy, dramaturgy) “The third, which Barthes calls
the “obtuse meaning,” constitutes that surplus of meaning which can’t be
exhausted by the other two.

This
level of “excess” (as It has been called by film scholar Kristin Thompson) is
the hardest to describe with any clarity, for most criticism, by equating a
film with its story and interpretation, fails to acknowledge that this third
meaning can exist on any level at all. Barthes finds it in his own subjective
observations of such details as the ugliness of the character Euphrosinia,
which “exceeds the anecdote, becomes a blunting of the meaning, its deflection”

Imagine
“following” not Euphrosinia’s machinations, nor even the characternor even, further, the countenance of the
Wicked Mother, but only, in this countenance, that grimace, that black veil,
the heavy, ugly dullness of that skin You will have another temporality another
film. A theme with neither variations nor developmentthe obtuse meaning can proceed
only by appearing and disappearing.

12 On the Way Out

Upon
Leaving the Movie Theater” begins with Barthes’s description of how much he
loves that curious activity, which he compares to coming out of hypnosis
Reflecting on the theater’s darkness and what it suggests to him-the “lack of
ceremony” and “relaxation of postures”—he settles on the poetic image of the
cocoon: “The film spectator might adopt the silk worm’s motto: inclusum labor illustrat:
because I am shut in I work, and shine with all the Intensity of my desire.”

Submerged
in the darkness of the theatre (an anonymous, crowded darkness how bonny and
frustrating all those so-called “private” screenings), we find the very source
of the fascination exercised by film (any film). Consider, on the other hand,
the opposite experience, the experience of television, which also shows films
nothing, no fascination, the darkness is dissolved, the anonymity repressed,
the space is familiar, organized (by furniture and familiar objects), tamed
Eroticism—or, better yet, in order to stress its frivolity, its incompleteness,
the eroticization of space—is foreclosed. Television condemns us to the Family,
whose household utensil it has become just as the hearth once was, flanked by
its predictable communal stewing pot in times past.

Linking
the ideological stereotype with the still image, Barthes wonders if we all
don’t have “a dual relationship with platitudes both narcissistic and
maternal,” In psychoanalytic terms. And the only way to pry oneself from the
mirror (i.e.,the screen) is to break
“the circle of duality/…filmic fascination” and “loosen the glue’s grip, the
hypnosis of verisimilitude” that is commonly referred to as suspension of
disbelief. This can be done “by resorting to some (aural or visual) comical
faculty of the spectator—isn’t that what is involved in the Brechtian
distancing effect?” Yet instead of going to movies “armed with the discourse of
counter-ideology,” Barthes suggests another way. This involves letting himself
be- come involved as if he had two bodies at once, one of them narcissistic,
and the other one “perverse,” making a fetish not of the image but of what
“exceeds” it. “The sound’s grain, the theatre, the obscure mass of other
bodies, the rays of light, the entrance, the exit . . .” The distance with
respect to the image, he concludes, is finally what fascinates us—a distance
which is not so much intellectual as “amorous” . . . And despite all the
numerous quarrels with cinema that Barthes maintained over a quarter of a
century of writing, one suspects that many of them, in the final analysis, were
a lover’s quarrels, a lover’s discourse. - The author’s thanks to Stephen
Heath,